This volume discusses how proprietary notions increasingly dominated copyright legal principles, with consequences for information dissemination in modern times. It covers the period to 1850, and begins with extracts from Roman law and early Christian and medieval teaching on ownership. The volume traces philosophical arguments about copyright law, reproducing writings of John Milton and John Locke on freedom of expression, and copyright justifications supplied by the idealist philosophers Johann Fichte and Immanuel Kant. Readings explain how the developments that created the social and...

This volume reproduces writings, social teachings, testimonies and reports of figures as diverse as Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and bodies such as the US Congress. Extracted material charts the development of an international system of copyright regulation, and the growth, in the 20th century, of copyright industries benefitting from new copyright laws. In the second half of the 19th century, many writers and thinkers, like Marx, attacked capital, and its corollary, property rights. Some writers, such as Victor Hugo, while exposing the horrors of poverty and social...